I agree entirely, however you have misinterpreted my statement. A seasoned veteran is not an "average programmer" I would hope that a seasoned veteran is a "good" programmer, or better yet, a "great" one. I don't expect a fresh grad to perform on-par with someone who's already been in the workplace, but they should be at a basic level of competancy, and I assert that most CS graduates are falling short of that, for whatever reason.
On the flip side, why is there such an excess of not-so-great programmers out there? The answer is simple: The higher education system is turning out not-so-great graduates. In an ideal world they would not, but we live in a world where there are "CS Graduates" who have never seen anything more than pseudo-code and java. There are some great programs and great graduates to be found for sure, but I think the writing on the wall is apparent -- the average graduate is a below-average programmer. There needs to be more hands-on exposure to real, complex code, or better yet, production code.
In the interim, unfortunately, we realistically need to take in some of the graduates that we have and finish the education they apparantly never received in full. If we don't -- if we let a bubble form between now and when the educational system corrects itself, then we will effectively lose much of the "tribal knowledge" that is passed down through the generations of the workforce.
You cannot sustain a class of experts in any endeavor simply by surrounding them with other experts. At some point they must mentor or pass down their knowledge to the next generation -- but the best way to ensure the next generation is to make sure that they're at least on-par as a developer.
I say all this as a relatively young developer who graduated in Computer Science in 2002.
There's something to be said for the humor/wit approach I think.
My college physics instructor used the same approach in writing his weekly homework assignments. Essentially, the year's homework detailed the exploits of "Green Sarge" (A real-life version of those plastic soldiers you find at the dollar store) vs the "Beige Chumps" and, later, his arch nemesis -- the Fez-wearing, scimitar-wielding Evil Physics Monkey. Even if the students didn't start the homework immediately, they would always read it to see what Sarge's next exploits would be, and the problem would be in the back of their mind ready to consume any spare brain-cycles. The humorous problems also lead to a lot of impromptu discussion about the problem as well, just talking in the hall or over a lunch table. I think it went a great way towards getting the students to embrace their homework.
[from (vague) memory]
Q) At what velocity must the Evil Physics Monkey fire himself head-on into the Green Army supply train in order to stop it? The Train has a mass of 80,000kg and is traveling at 50km/h. The Evil Physics Monkey has a mass of 100kg. The EPM's scimitar has a mass of 15kg, recalculate the problem assuming that the EPM has carried his scimitar into battle with the Green Army supply train. Assume structural and soft-tissue damages are not a factor.
Thats actually a really good idea, though, if its not in now its far too late to add such a large feature, test it, and hammer out all the bugs since Halo 3 is due out in under 2 months now. Its not such a huge feature that it couldn't be applied via a patch, however.
I'm glad to hear that online co-op is in, it wasn't necessary to have it, but it is a really nice plus and it will add a ton of replay value. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who's moved half-way across the country since the original Halo (or any of those N64 co-op FPSs before it) leaving high school/college buddies and family behind who I used to have a blast playing co-op with. Now we can play though Halo 3 together, just like old times, but with 4 of us instead of just 2.
I frankly have little interest in ending this as any more of a pissing match than it already is, and aside from that I'm relatively freshly out of college and my current work is under NDA, so I couldn't reveal it anyhow.
The fact is, most everything you've stated boils down to either something which sounds suspiciously like KB/M-snobbery or flawed logic. Any reasonably intelligent person, personal bias aside, can deduce the reality of the situation by judging the arguments on either side by their logical merits.
If he "asked around" to the other big names, I think Microsoft just missed a big opportunity. If they could have lured One of Sony's top design talents away from the playstation systems it would have been a pretty big coup for them. He's been on a hot streak lately with God of War, Twisted Metal and Calling All Cars. Even if they could have made an attractive enough deal to persuade him to go multi-platform it would have been a good move.
HD games have far less auto-aim applied, because higher resolutions allow the devs to ease off, its still there though because, like all console games, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator -- e.g. SDTV ~320x240. Collision detection in 3D games is not pixel-based, therefore you cannot say that larger pixels makes it easier because, in fact it makes it harder. Auto-aim is, in part, a method of saying "If this were running at a decent resolution, which of those 16 pixels would they most-likely be aiming at if they had them?" You can't really compare to Wolfenstien or Doom, because those were fundamentally different tecnology and operate entirely differently; there was no capacity for precision shooting, like head-shots... you fired and it hit or did not, and the damage dealt was the same regardless of whether you hit them in the arm or dead-center. If you want to see how much harder a low resolution makes it, go play your favorite FPS at its lowest settings.
TV's being bigger doesn't make up for it. because most people don't have monster TVs. I have a 46" DLP myself, and yet it takes up roughly 1/2 or 1/3 as much of my vision as my PC monitor as I type this. My PC monitor is a 22" wide screen CRT, and it's maximum resolution is twice that of my TV's. So, 4 times as many pixels in 1/2 to 1/3 the space, means It displays 8-12 times as much detail into my field of vision. I would need a roughly 80-90" television at 2x 720p to match it.
The reason for auto aim is not simply the sticks, and I've given plenty of logical arguments showing why. Being a game developer myself, I think that I have just a little more insight into the full reasoning.
I am quite serious, I assure you.
With appropriate sensitivity on the sticks neither small nor large movements should pose any technical problem, then its a matter of the user's skill. Arbitrary constraints on the mouse might include the configured sensitivity or clutter on one's desk, though I'll leave that aside since both are easily rectified.
There are plenty of reason's that auto-aim exists on console games, though strict KB/M users only seem to believe that its an "accuracy" issue alone. Other, more significant issues include, but are not limited to the following... Televisions are relatively low resolution compared to PC monitors, imagine an SDTV player (at roughly 320x240 pixels) vs a fairly typical PC player (at 1280x960 pixels) -- the PC player has 16x the potential accuracy due to resolution alone; HDTV helps, 720p brings console players on par with an typical PC player, but the increased potential for accuracy remains at ~4x greater comparing the best HDTV resolutions to the best monitor resolutions that are reasonable for a modern video card to push. Next is the fact that PC games are played at a distance of roughly 18-24 inches from the screen, while a typical console gamer might sit anywhere between 6-10 feet away. In essence, the PC gamer will have a higher-resolution image that will likely fill more of their vision, allowing them to see much more detail. There are other minor issues, including refresh rates, color-bleed, etc that can adversely affect a typical console-gaming scenario as well.
Next up, your final point is flawed, because it only holds true if you define "inherently superior" purely as "easy to use". No one claims the Toyota Corrola is "inherently superior" to a Porsche simply because it requires less skill to drive well, or is more approachable. So, define "inherently superior". I would define it as clearly better, in all cases, without question.
Finally, though this wasn't the crux of my argument previously, a dual-stick controller does bring with it other niceties, which include: A nice ergonomic design, analog movement (Keyboards are digital, of course. You might be able to select between a couple movement speeds, but a stick can move the player at any speed any direction within the two primary axis) and intuitively placed and well-spaced buttons (granted a keyboard has plenty of buttons, but how many can you hit accurately, without looking, and without hitting/bumping the wrong key. Oh, and do it quickly.)
To be clear, I do play a lot of PC FPSs on KB/M as well, occasionally, I'll even play them with my Xbox 360 gamepad (and contrary to what you might believe, I still do fine). I'm not claiming that the sticks are superior, merely that KB/M is not inherently superior either. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an FPS that allows play between PC and console that's worth playing (Shadowrun doesn't appear to be) or any PC FPS that supports gamepads as anything more than an afterthought.
I did, and do claim that KB/M is not inherently superior. Some people will simply not use it, or be capable of ever using it efficiently. I think the real issue is that the KB/M approach is more approachable -- Its easier for an average gamer to use because its something they're used to and because the range of motion from one extreme to the other is larger and there's the full-stop capability of a mouse, where the control stick must come back to center to stop.
KB/M is *not* inherently better, they're just easier to play at a reasonably competent level, dual-sticks takes a little more getting used to, which some people seem unwilling, or incapable of doing -- or even conceding that perhaps, just perhaps, that other's can.
Believe me, I'm waiting for a cross-platform PC/console FPS, or even a PC FPS that has first-class controller support, that's worth playing because I'd love the opportunity.
I really don't get this disdain for those who actually can play with dual analog. Its really just a matter of getting good using the controls, just like being able to make those twitch-shots with a mouse and keyboard on the PC.
I hadn't played any Halo 2 on my 360 for the past month until last night. My younger sister was playing the team-training playlist, and a game of SWAT came up so she was getting thoroughly trounced -- for those unfamiliar, SWAT is a game of no shields, no radar, where head-shots are the only effective way of dispatching your opponents. In the course of the 5 remaining minutes of the game, I took over and killed 14 enemies and died 3 times myself. I wasn't firing wildly either, it was aim-pop-dead; all headshots. I do realize that there's some auto-aim applied in Halo 2, but it wasn't needed; there's even less in Halo 3.
To each their own, but neither control method is inherently superior.
720p is better for fast-action video like Sports, most television and most games. 1080i is better for video with a much less dynamic scene, a good example of which are nature shows. If you receive HD broadcasts, flip through some channels with the video mode display active, you'll see that Sports are always 720p and nature shows are nearly-always 1080i.
Of course, 1080p is the best (for now) providing you have a set that can display it and bandwidth enough to drive it.
Just to post another analogy into the mix: If a store post an incorrect price, and it can be reasonably assumed that its a valid price (ie -- an incorrect decimal place usually doesn't cut it), they have to honor it until a public correction is posted. Usually they'll post the correction near the entrance, the sales bulletin board, and near the item itself. At least that's the way it was were I grew up.
The bottom line is that if a business entity makes a mistake, they have to eat it. If there's culpability on the part of the slot manufacturer for their faulty software, then its up to the casino to go after them to re-coup their loss.
Was it dishonest to exploit the machine knowingly? Absolutely. Did everyone know? probably not. How can you separate those who did from those who didn't? You can't. You cannot prove to a reasonable degree of certainty that any of these people *knew* they were exploiting the machine. No proof? No Criminal.
Any judgment you can make will be solely on the perception of someone as honest or dishonest -- that infamous and often untrustworthy "gut instinct", and even at that I would still maintain that there's no criminal act to be guilty of in the first place.
I suppose that "Implimenting OpenGL on the Wii" paper will be riddled with NDA material, but on the off chance that its fit for public consumption, where might I be able to find it when its finished? I'd be very interested to give it a read.
First, let me say that I'm a huge Halo fan; $130 special Legendary Edition Halo 3 pre-order huge. Co-op in Halo 1 & 2 is one of my favorite features, right behind multiplayer versus matches, but I can honestly say that online co-op is not a must-have for me, its just a nice extra.
There are plenty of technical why this could be a problem, the primary reason is one of scale. In online multiplayer, games are limited to 16 players max -- some of the larger Halo battles in campaign mode have included many times that number (think of the flood) -- creating network code that can support that number of entities in a small space in a fast-paced FPS is no easy task. The fact that it *is* supported over LAN is a huge clue that this is the primary difficulty -- obviously the networking system supports it, but the WAN latency is probably probably killing it. When the play becomes lagged its no longer accurate and not worth doing, IMHO.
As alluded to in the article, you can do some design things to avoid those situations, but then you start to damage the things that Make the game what it is in the first place.
The Halo series was never known for its graphics prowess, nor did it ever claim to. Perhaps the original was the best (or one of the better) looking launch titles, but both Halo and Halo 2 were easily surpassed by the likes of Half Life 2 or Doom 3, both of which were ported to the original XBox.
Aside from that, the visual style of Halo simply doesn't transfer well to the uber-realistic rendering of games like Gears of War and forcing it to do so would be detrimental to the game's sense of identity. Heck, I already disliked the sheer amount of useless "clutter" objects present in certain levels of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.
In the end it did what it should have done: look like Halo only better, rather than striving to be the neat, new thing and loosing a part of its identity.
A computer graphics course using any API (be it OpenGL, DirectX, or what-have-you) is like a data structures course that focuses solely on the STL (or your favorite language's equivalent); it has its place at a higher level but it is not a replacement for down-and-dirty, low-level study and implementation.
Many universities these days are turning out "programmers" rather than "computer scientists" -- they can get stuff done, provided the tools are available to them, but God help you if you ever ask one to create that tool themselves. Pointers scare the hell out of them, they can't read declarations with more than 1 level of indirection, even simple concepts like recursion are beyond them (I once had an interviewer tell me that most people took 15 minutes to solve the recursion interview question which took me all of 60 seconds to solve and explain, and then they were wishy-washy when he challenged their solution, even if it was correct -- they had no confidence in their solution.)
Its a sad day when a CS student goes through "Computer Graphics I" and may have never studied (and implemented) the variety of line-drawing algorithms to experience first-hand their respective code complexity and performance, or who have never experienced the joy of drawing an ellipse using a purely-incremental algorithm using second-order derivatives.
Its an even sadder day when a CS student goes through "Data Structures" and may have never implemented a self-balancing binary tree, KD-trees, red-black trees, pooled memory allocators or skip-lists.
APIs come and go, but fundamentals are forever. I pity the poor programmer who "knows Direct3D" only to have it replaced by DirectRayTracer years down the line.
Not all is lost, as there still are many great CS schools that haven't forgotten about the fundamentals, but I think there are many who have unfortunately lost their way.
As far as I know, the $2000 price that gets bandied about was for the very early devkits, which essentially consisted of a couple wired Wiimotes, a sensor bar and some software, which was intended to be used with a Gamecube Devkit, its sole purpose was to get devs working with the Wiimote early, finding out what they could do with it, and prototyping Wii games until the full Wii Kit arrived.
If someone in the know can actually confirm one way or the other on more than hear-say I'd be glad to have it all cleared up.
Doesn't suprise me at all. Just a couple months ago I switched to a laser printer, here's why:
I have a pretty nice Epson photo printer, it even prints directly onto CDs/DVDs. It gets very little use as far as the color ink goes, black is used more frequently. My black ink cartridge ran out, so I popped it out and gave it a good shake to confirm its emptiness. I replaced the cartridge, and got ready to print. It then refused to print black & white text, as it was reporting that all the color cartriges were empty. I fiddled with settings, set B&W-only mode and rebooted the printer to no avail. Next, I removed the color cartriges and gave them a good shake for 30 seconds each, and they clearly had ink inside. I put the cartriges back in, cleaned the print heads, and rebooted once more. Still no dice. I removed them and tried to print with only the black cartrige in place to no avail. This was increadably frustrating, this particular model requires 6 different color cartriges at 15-20 bucks a pop, and was refusing to print a black & white document because it was reporting full color cartriges as empty.
My girlfriend had just done a report on laser vs. inkjet printers for home use for her entry CIS class, and came to the conclusion that a laser printer is only marginally more expensive (and this was ignoring color ink cartriges) something like 1/10th of a cent per page difference in ink/toner expense. Armed with this, I went to the local Frys, and was able to pick up a $200 HP laser printer on sale for roughly $100 bucks, and it came with a half-full toner cartrige. The full set of inkjet cartriges would have been roughly the same amount.
The Inkjet now sits on my shelf awaiting whatever fate I decide to give it. If I were more easily influenced I might be tempted to give it an Office Space-style beat-down, however I'm sure there's someone out there who would be happy to pay the ink tax.
1) Get a damn money order, it'll cost you a couple bucks.
2) Go to a Credit Union, they're far better than banks. Many offer debit/credit cards if you wish.
Out of curiousity, how do you recieve your income check? Most banks don't cash checks unless you have an account, or charge for the pleasure. The only place to cash a substantial check is at a check-cashing broker, which also charge a good-sized fee. Being from a small town, I know things are different there; one can usually cash a fair-sized check on their reputation alone, but the city is different. MAybe you have a trusted friend/family member playing middle-man?
Honestly, building a good credit record is a good thing. How many people are able to pay for a car/house/large whatever with cash outright. Even if you have enough cash for the down payment it still can be hard to structure a payment plan for the balance if you've got no credit history. Getting a house is basically essential for the financial success of most people these days, as it frees you from burning money on rent and instead builds your own equity.
I agree with your point that the optimizations should be taken based on a feature-by-feature basis, however its likely that code optimized for Intel's processor extensions might be sub-optimal on AMD's extensions. All these instruction sets like SSE, MMX, even x87 and x86 are essentially specs; the implimentation can and often does differ. Each new core from each vendor will have different latancy and throughput characteristics that will have a bearing on what the optimal code for each platform will look like. An approach that results in a 17-cycle computation on a Core 2 duo might require 19 on AMDs K8 architecture where a different approach might yield 16-cycle execution. The story might change again with K10, which might very well run that Core 2 duo codepath even faster than intel.
So, while I aggree that they should take the better-than-nothing approach of using the SSE code on SSE-supporting AMD processors, I can see how they'd rather avoid the business of writing highly-optimized code for their competitors. By sidelining the competitors' chips to platform-agnostic C/C++ code, they avoid a situation where AMD comes back and complains about their SSE paths being sub-optimal for their CPUs. AMD has to come up with their own Performance Primitives if they want an optimal solution.
I forget the name of the project, but I've seen a few OpenSource projects aimed at unifying the various vector instruction sets (MMX, 3DNow!, SSE/2/3/4, Altivec) under a common set of compiler-independant "intrinsics" (basically mapping their intrinsics onto each compiler's instrinsics) but of course this doesn't solve the problem of generating optimal code, only the problem of maintaining several optimized code-paths. Maybe its time for the FOSS community to develop a free and open competitor to Intel's Performance Primitives targetting AMD's extensions, Intel's extensions and possibly Altivec that are API compatible.
True, but most companies have arcade-ized their howm-hardware, rather than the other way around, as was the case with the Neo-Geo. On top of that the home Neo-Geo was not at all stripped down, the only difference between the home and arcade units was the video output (composite/scart vs. RGB) and the fact that the home version had plugable joysticks.
Both the Unisystem and Naomi came after their home versions, and I suspect the same is true of the System 16, though I'm not sure.
Let me put it another way. In the Super Nintendo generation, it was less powerful than the TG16, the 3DO, the Phillips CD-i (pardon me while I die laughing), and the Neo Geo. But it was also worlds less expensive. Its only real competitor in that generation was the Sega Genesis, a console that was less powerful than the Super Nintendo!
To be fair, the CD-i and 3D0 were really not worth mentioning, both were essentially media systems with games bolted on to try to excuse the high price, particularly the CD-i and the 3D0 only slightly less so.
Between the SNES, TG16 and Genesis, the SNES was far more powerful in terms of CPU, graphics and sound. The SNES had the least powerful CPU on paper, but the genesis and TG16 CPUs were often tied up with other tasks; The genesis CPU was partly responsible for generating the video timing signal, and the TG16's CPU (which was only an 8bit to begin with) was partly responsible for generating the TG16's sound samples. The TG16 and Genesis graphical units were pretty comperable only supporting tiled bitmap graphics and sprites. The SNES chip had rotation and scaling in hardware as well as being able to display 256 colors out of a palette of 32,768, while the genesis could display only 64 from a pallete of 512 and the TG displaying up to 512 (256 colors each for foreground and background) from a pallete of 512. The Genesis and TG16 only had fairly rudementary sound systems, basically tones and white noise generators, while the SNES had a programmable sound chip with its own DSP and RAM.
The lesson to learn from this is that graphical power != better games. Better games == Better games, and damn the graphical power. The sooner people realize this, the better. (Or should I say, the sooner they get over their insecurity at having purchased a PS3?)
That point is well made and well taken. Look back at who's won each console generation: the 2600, the NES, the SNES, the Playstation and the PS2. Only the SNES had a true hardware advantage. Its always come down to who had solid software support, both in quantity, quality and variety. The same goes for the hendheld world that Nintendo defined with the original gameboy and has held ever since, dispite competitors constantly attacking with more powerful hardware. The gamegear, lynx, TG portable, Nomad, GameCom, Wonderswan and NeoGeo Pocket have all failed to take the lead, garnering at most a following of hardcore fans. Only the PSP, for all its flaws, has managed to hold on as long as it has and to have done as well as it has, but even it is recieving a thorough thrashing at the hand of the GBA and DSs two-pronged fury.
How is this a problem? If the free Silver account allows you to freely view and join servers, just the same as most PC games do now, how are you losing anything? Are you bitching that adding extras like matchmaking and voice chat, not to mention a mechanism to ban known cheaters, will cost you less than 5 bucks a month?
The vast majority of current PC games supporting free multiplayer seem to provide the same thing that the free Silver account will. Also keep in mind that the Account is the same for your Xbox 360 and original XBox. Personally, having one consistant identity, with the same reputation and buddy list, across 3 different platforms is pretty much worth the money to me already.
The arguement in the article seems to be "Some PC games provide some of this functionality for free, therefore any system bringing it all together should be free too!"
While the multiplayer aspects are certainly Halo's holding point over the long term, the single-player campaigns are fun as well. The arguements against the Halo 2 plot was not that it was bad, or lacking, but because the story arch fell apart at the very end -- The plot was never concluded, it simply stopped. Basically, they botched an attempt at a cliff-hanger ending.
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I agree entirely, however you have misinterpreted my statement. A seasoned veteran is not an "average programmer" I would hope that a seasoned veteran is a "good" programmer, or better yet, a "great" one. I don't expect a fresh grad to perform on-par with someone who's already been in the workplace, but they should be at a basic level of competancy, and I assert that most CS graduates are falling short of that, for whatever reason.
On the flip side, why is there such an excess of not-so-great programmers out there? The answer is simple: The higher education system is turning out not-so-great graduates. In an ideal world they would not, but we live in a world where there are "CS Graduates" who have never seen anything more than pseudo-code and java. There are some great programs and great graduates to be found for sure, but I think the writing on the wall is apparent -- the average graduate is a below-average programmer. There needs to be more hands-on exposure to real, complex code, or better yet, production code.
In the interim, unfortunately, we realistically need to take in some of the graduates that we have and finish the education they apparantly never received in full. If we don't -- if we let a bubble form between now and when the educational system corrects itself, then we will effectively lose much of the "tribal knowledge" that is passed down through the generations of the workforce.
You cannot sustain a class of experts in any endeavor simply by surrounding them with other experts. At some point they must mentor or pass down their knowledge to the next generation -- but the best way to ensure the next generation is to make sure that they're at least on-par as a developer.
I say all this as a relatively young developer who graduated in Computer Science in 2002.
There's something to be said for the humor/wit approach I think.
My college physics instructor used the same approach in writing his weekly homework assignments. Essentially, the year's homework detailed the exploits of "Green Sarge" (A real-life version of those plastic soldiers you find at the dollar store) vs the "Beige Chumps" and, later, his arch nemesis -- the Fez-wearing, scimitar-wielding Evil Physics Monkey. Even if the students didn't start the homework immediately, they would always read it to see what Sarge's next exploits would be, and the problem would be in the back of their mind ready to consume any spare brain-cycles. The humorous problems also lead to a lot of impromptu discussion about the problem as well, just talking in the hall or over a lunch table. I think it went a great way towards getting the students to embrace their homework.
[from (vague) memory]
Q) At what velocity must the Evil Physics Monkey fire himself head-on into the Green Army supply train in order to stop it? The Train has a mass of 80,000kg and is traveling at 50km/h. The Evil Physics Monkey has a mass of 100kg. The EPM's scimitar has a mass of 15kg, recalculate the problem assuming that the EPM has carried his scimitar into battle with the Green Army supply train. Assume structural and soft-tissue damages are not a factor.
Thats actually a really good idea, though, if its not in now its far too late to add such a large feature, test it, and hammer out all the bugs since Halo 3 is due out in under 2 months now. Its not such a huge feature that it couldn't be applied via a patch, however.
I'm glad to hear that online co-op is in, it wasn't necessary to have it, but it is a really nice plus and it will add a ton of replay value. I'm sure that I'm not the only one who's moved half-way across the country since the original Halo (or any of those N64 co-op FPSs before it) leaving high school/college buddies and family behind who I used to have a blast playing co-op with. Now we can play though Halo 3 together, just like old times, but with 4 of us instead of just 2.
I frankly have little interest in ending this as any more of a pissing match than it already is, and aside from that I'm relatively freshly out of college and my current work is under NDA, so I couldn't reveal it anyhow.
The fact is, most everything you've stated boils down to either something which sounds suspiciously like KB/M-snobbery or flawed logic. Any reasonably intelligent person, personal bias aside, can deduce the reality of the situation by judging the arguments on either side by their logical merits.
If he "asked around" to the other big names, I think Microsoft just missed a big opportunity. If they could have lured One of Sony's top design talents away from the playstation systems it would have been a pretty big coup for them. He's been on a hot streak lately with God of War, Twisted Metal and Calling All Cars. Even if they could have made an attractive enough deal to persuade him to go multi-platform it would have been a good move.
HD games have far less auto-aim applied, because higher resolutions allow the devs to ease off, its still there though because, like all console games, they have to cater to the lowest common denominator -- e.g. SDTV ~320x240. Collision detection in 3D games is not pixel-based, therefore you cannot say that larger pixels makes it easier because, in fact it makes it harder. Auto-aim is, in part, a method of saying "If this were running at a decent resolution, which of those 16 pixels would they most-likely be aiming at if they had them?" You can't really compare to Wolfenstien or Doom, because those were fundamentally different tecnology and operate entirely differently; there was no capacity for precision shooting, like head-shots... you fired and it hit or did not, and the damage dealt was the same regardless of whether you hit them in the arm or dead-center. If you want to see how much harder a low resolution makes it, go play your favorite FPS at its lowest settings.
TV's being bigger doesn't make up for it. because most people don't have monster TVs. I have a 46" DLP myself, and yet it takes up roughly 1/2 or 1/3 as much of my vision as my PC monitor as I type this. My PC monitor is a 22" wide screen CRT, and it's maximum resolution is twice that of my TV's. So, 4 times as many pixels in 1/2 to 1/3 the space, means It displays 8-12 times as much detail into my field of vision. I would need a roughly 80-90" television at 2x 720p to match it.
The reason for auto aim is not simply the sticks, and I've given plenty of logical arguments showing why. Being a game developer myself, I think that I have just a little more insight into the full reasoning.
I am quite serious, I assure you. With appropriate sensitivity on the sticks neither small nor large movements should pose any technical problem, then its a matter of the user's skill. Arbitrary constraints on the mouse might include the configured sensitivity or clutter on one's desk, though I'll leave that aside since both are easily rectified. There are plenty of reason's that auto-aim exists on console games, though strict KB/M users only seem to believe that its an "accuracy" issue alone. Other, more significant issues include, but are not limited to the following... Televisions are relatively low resolution compared to PC monitors, imagine an SDTV player (at roughly 320x240 pixels) vs a fairly typical PC player (at 1280x960 pixels) -- the PC player has 16x the potential accuracy due to resolution alone; HDTV helps, 720p brings console players on par with an typical PC player, but the increased potential for accuracy remains at ~4x greater comparing the best HDTV resolutions to the best monitor resolutions that are reasonable for a modern video card to push. Next is the fact that PC games are played at a distance of roughly 18-24 inches from the screen, while a typical console gamer might sit anywhere between 6-10 feet away. In essence, the PC gamer will have a higher-resolution image that will likely fill more of their vision, allowing them to see much more detail. There are other minor issues, including refresh rates, color-bleed, etc that can adversely affect a typical console-gaming scenario as well. Next up, your final point is flawed, because it only holds true if you define "inherently superior" purely as "easy to use". No one claims the Toyota Corrola is "inherently superior" to a Porsche simply because it requires less skill to drive well, or is more approachable. So, define "inherently superior". I would define it as clearly better, in all cases, without question. Finally, though this wasn't the crux of my argument previously, a dual-stick controller does bring with it other niceties, which include: A nice ergonomic design, analog movement (Keyboards are digital, of course. You might be able to select between a couple movement speeds, but a stick can move the player at any speed any direction within the two primary axis) and intuitively placed and well-spaced buttons (granted a keyboard has plenty of buttons, but how many can you hit accurately, without looking, and without hitting/bumping the wrong key. Oh, and do it quickly.) To be clear, I do play a lot of PC FPSs on KB/M as well, occasionally, I'll even play them with my Xbox 360 gamepad (and contrary to what you might believe, I still do fine). I'm not claiming that the sticks are superior, merely that KB/M is not inherently superior either. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an FPS that allows play between PC and console that's worth playing (Shadowrun doesn't appear to be) or any PC FPS that supports gamepads as anything more than an afterthought.
I did, and do claim that KB/M is not inherently superior. Some people will simply not use it, or be capable of ever using it efficiently. I think the real issue is that the KB/M approach is more approachable -- Its easier for an average gamer to use because its something they're used to and because the range of motion from one extreme to the other is larger and there's the full-stop capability of a mouse, where the control stick must come back to center to stop.
KB/M is *not* inherently better, they're just easier to play at a reasonably competent level, dual-sticks takes a little more getting used to, which some people seem unwilling, or incapable of doing -- or even conceding that perhaps, just perhaps, that other's can.
Believe me, I'm waiting for a cross-platform PC/console FPS, or even a PC FPS that has first-class controller support, that's worth playing because I'd love the opportunity.
I really don't get this disdain for those who actually can play with dual analog. Its really just a matter of getting good using the controls, just like being able to make those twitch-shots with a mouse and keyboard on the PC. I hadn't played any Halo 2 on my 360 for the past month until last night. My younger sister was playing the team-training playlist, and a game of SWAT came up so she was getting thoroughly trounced -- for those unfamiliar, SWAT is a game of no shields, no radar, where head-shots are the only effective way of dispatching your opponents. In the course of the 5 remaining minutes of the game, I took over and killed 14 enemies and died 3 times myself. I wasn't firing wildly either, it was aim-pop-dead; all headshots. I do realize that there's some auto-aim applied in Halo 2, but it wasn't needed; there's even less in Halo 3. To each their own, but neither control method is inherently superior.
720p is better for fast-action video like Sports, most television and most games. 1080i is better for video with a much less dynamic scene, a good example of which are nature shows. If you receive HD broadcasts, flip through some channels with the video mode display active, you'll see that Sports are always 720p and nature shows are nearly-always 1080i.
Of course, 1080p is the best (for now) providing you have a set that can display it and bandwidth enough to drive it.
Just to post another analogy into the mix: If a store post an incorrect price, and it can be reasonably assumed that its a valid price (ie -- an incorrect decimal place usually doesn't cut it), they have to honor it until a public correction is posted. Usually they'll post the correction near the entrance, the sales bulletin board, and near the item itself. At least that's the way it was were I grew up.
The bottom line is that if a business entity makes a mistake, they have to eat it. If there's culpability on the part of the slot manufacturer for their faulty software, then its up to the casino to go after them to re-coup their loss.
Was it dishonest to exploit the machine knowingly? Absolutely. Did everyone know? probably not. How can you separate those who did from those who didn't? You can't. You cannot prove to a reasonable degree of certainty that any of these people *knew* they were exploiting the machine. No proof? No Criminal.
Any judgment you can make will be solely on the perception of someone as honest or dishonest -- that infamous and often untrustworthy "gut instinct", and even at that I would still maintain that there's no criminal act to be guilty of in the first place.
I suppose that "Implimenting OpenGL on the Wii" paper will be riddled with NDA material, but on the off chance that its fit for public consumption, where might I be able to find it when its finished? I'd be very interested to give it a read.
First, let me say that I'm a huge Halo fan; $130 special Legendary Edition Halo 3 pre-order huge. Co-op in Halo 1 & 2 is one of my favorite features, right behind multiplayer versus matches, but I can honestly say that online co-op is not a must-have for me, its just a nice extra.
There are plenty of technical why this could be a problem, the primary reason is one of scale. In online multiplayer, games are limited to 16 players max -- some of the larger Halo battles in campaign mode have included many times that number (think of the flood) -- creating network code that can support that number of entities in a small space in a fast-paced FPS is no easy task. The fact that it *is* supported over LAN is a huge clue that this is the primary difficulty -- obviously the networking system supports it, but the WAN latency is probably probably killing it. When the play becomes lagged its no longer accurate and not worth doing, IMHO.
As alluded to in the article, you can do some design things to avoid those situations, but then you start to damage the things that Make the game what it is in the first place.
The Halo series was never known for its graphics prowess, nor did it ever claim to. Perhaps the original was the best (or one of the better) looking launch titles, but both Halo and Halo 2 were easily surpassed by the likes of Half Life 2 or Doom 3, both of which were ported to the original XBox.
Aside from that, the visual style of Halo simply doesn't transfer well to the uber-realistic rendering of games like Gears of War and forcing it to do so would be detrimental to the game's sense of identity. Heck, I already disliked the sheer amount of useless "clutter" objects present in certain levels of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta.
In the end it did what it should have done: look like Halo only better, rather than striving to be the neat, new thing and loosing a part of its identity.
A computer graphics course using any API (be it OpenGL, DirectX, or what-have-you) is like a data structures course that focuses solely on the STL (or your favorite language's equivalent); it has its place at a higher level but it is not a replacement for down-and-dirty, low-level study and implementation.
Many universities these days are turning out "programmers" rather than "computer scientists" -- they can get stuff done, provided the tools are available to them, but God help you if you ever ask one to create that tool themselves. Pointers scare the hell out of them, they can't read declarations with more than 1 level of indirection, even simple concepts like recursion are beyond them (I once had an interviewer tell me that most people took 15 minutes to solve the recursion interview question which took me all of 60 seconds to solve and explain, and then they were wishy-washy when he challenged their solution, even if it was correct -- they had no confidence in their solution.)
Its a sad day when a CS student goes through "Computer Graphics I" and may have never studied (and implemented) the variety of line-drawing algorithms to experience first-hand their respective code complexity and performance, or who have never experienced the joy of drawing an ellipse using a purely-incremental algorithm using second-order derivatives.
Its an even sadder day when a CS student goes through "Data Structures" and may have never implemented a self-balancing binary tree, KD-trees, red-black trees, pooled memory allocators or skip-lists.
APIs come and go, but fundamentals are forever. I pity the poor programmer who "knows Direct3D" only to have it replaced by DirectRayTracer years down the line.
Not all is lost, as there still are many great CS schools that haven't forgotten about the fundamentals, but I think there are many who have unfortunately lost their way.
("Deconstructing" is in quotes because that's not actually what deconstruction is, but it's how some writers define it if they don't know any better.)
Here's an example of a writer trying to sound smart by taking something obvious and "deconstructing" it to make it look not obvious.
Sorry, couldn't resist!
As far as I know, the $2000 price that gets bandied about was for the very early devkits, which essentially consisted of a couple wired Wiimotes, a sensor bar and some software, which was intended to be used with a Gamecube Devkit, its sole purpose was to get devs working with the Wiimote early, finding out what they could do with it, and prototyping Wii games until the full Wii Kit arrived.
If someone in the know can actually confirm one way or the other on more than hear-say I'd be glad to have it all cleared up.
Doesn't suprise me at all. Just a couple months ago I switched to a laser printer, here's why:
I have a pretty nice Epson photo printer, it even prints directly onto CDs/DVDs. It gets very little use as far as the color ink goes, black is used more frequently. My black ink cartridge ran out, so I popped it out and gave it a good shake to confirm its emptiness. I replaced the cartridge, and got ready to print. It then refused to print black & white text, as it was reporting that all the color cartriges were empty. I fiddled with settings, set B&W-only mode and rebooted the printer to no avail. Next, I removed the color cartriges and gave them a good shake for 30 seconds each, and they clearly had ink inside. I put the cartriges back in, cleaned the print heads, and rebooted once more. Still no dice. I removed them and tried to print with only the black cartrige in place to no avail. This was increadably frustrating, this particular model requires 6 different color cartriges at 15-20 bucks a pop, and was refusing to print a black & white document because it was reporting full color cartriges as empty.
My girlfriend had just done a report on laser vs. inkjet printers for home use for her entry CIS class, and came to the conclusion that a laser printer is only marginally more expensive (and this was ignoring color ink cartriges) something like 1/10th of a cent per page difference in ink/toner expense. Armed with this, I went to the local Frys, and was able to pick up a $200 HP laser printer on sale for roughly $100 bucks, and it came with a half-full toner cartrige. The full set of inkjet cartriges would have been roughly the same amount.
The Inkjet now sits on my shelf awaiting whatever fate I decide to give it. If I were more easily influenced I might be tempted to give it an Office Space-style beat-down, however I'm sure there's someone out there who would be happy to pay the ink tax.
1) Get a damn money order, it'll cost you a couple bucks.
2) Go to a Credit Union, they're far better than banks. Many offer debit/credit cards if you wish.
Out of curiousity, how do you recieve your income check? Most banks don't cash checks unless you have an account, or charge for the pleasure. The only place to cash a substantial check is at a check-cashing broker, which also charge a good-sized fee. Being from a small town, I know things are different there; one can usually cash a fair-sized check on their reputation alone, but the city is different. MAybe you have a trusted friend/family member playing middle-man?
Honestly, building a good credit record is a good thing. How many people are able to pay for a car/house/large whatever with cash outright. Even if you have enough cash for the down payment it still can be hard to structure a payment plan for the balance if you've got no credit history. Getting a house is basically essential for the financial success of most people these days, as it frees you from burning money on rent and instead builds your own equity.
I agree with your point that the optimizations should be taken based on a feature-by-feature basis, however its likely that code optimized for Intel's processor extensions might be sub-optimal on AMD's extensions. All these instruction sets like SSE, MMX, even x87 and x86 are essentially specs; the implimentation can and often does differ. Each new core from each vendor will have different latancy and throughput characteristics that will have a bearing on what the optimal code for each platform will look like. An approach that results in a 17-cycle computation on a Core 2 duo might require 19 on AMDs K8 architecture where a different approach might yield 16-cycle execution. The story might change again with K10, which might very well run that Core 2 duo codepath even faster than intel.
So, while I aggree that they should take the better-than-nothing approach of using the SSE code on SSE-supporting AMD processors, I can see how they'd rather avoid the business of writing highly-optimized code for their competitors. By sidelining the competitors' chips to platform-agnostic C/C++ code, they avoid a situation where AMD comes back and complains about their SSE paths being sub-optimal for their CPUs. AMD has to come up with their own Performance Primitives if they want an optimal solution.
I forget the name of the project, but I've seen a few OpenSource projects aimed at unifying the various vector instruction sets (MMX, 3DNow!, SSE/2/3/4, Altivec) under a common set of compiler-independant "intrinsics" (basically mapping their intrinsics onto each compiler's instrinsics) but of course this doesn't solve the problem of generating optimal code, only the problem of maintaining several optimized code-paths. Maybe its time for the FOSS community to develop a free and open competitor to Intel's Performance Primitives targetting AMD's extensions, Intel's extensions and possibly Altivec that are API compatible.
True, but most companies have arcade-ized their howm-hardware, rather than the other way around, as was the case with the Neo-Geo. On top of that the home Neo-Geo was not at all stripped down, the only difference between the home and arcade units was the video output (composite/scart vs. RGB) and the fact that the home version had plugable joysticks. Both the Unisystem and Naomi came after their home versions, and I suspect the same is true of the System 16, though I'm not sure.
Let me put it another way. In the Super Nintendo generation, it was less powerful than the TG16, the 3DO, the Phillips CD-i (pardon me while I die laughing), and the Neo Geo. But it was also worlds less expensive. Its only real competitor in that generation was the Sega Genesis, a console that was less powerful than the Super Nintendo!
To be fair, the CD-i and 3D0 were really not worth mentioning, both were essentially media systems with games bolted on to try to excuse the high price, particularly the CD-i and the 3D0 only slightly less so.
Between the SNES, TG16 and Genesis, the SNES was far more powerful in terms of CPU, graphics and sound. The SNES had the least powerful CPU on paper, but the genesis and TG16 CPUs were often tied up with other tasks; The genesis CPU was partly responsible for generating the video timing signal, and the TG16's CPU (which was only an 8bit to begin with) was partly responsible for generating the TG16's sound samples. The TG16 and Genesis graphical units were pretty comperable only supporting tiled bitmap graphics and sprites. The SNES chip had rotation and scaling in hardware as well as being able to display 256 colors out of a palette of 32,768, while the genesis could display only 64 from a pallete of 512 and the TG displaying up to 512 (256 colors each for foreground and background) from a pallete of 512. The Genesis and TG16 only had fairly rudementary sound systems, basically tones and white noise generators, while the SNES had a programmable sound chip with its own DSP and RAM.
The lesson to learn from this is that graphical power != better games. Better games == Better games, and damn the graphical power. The sooner people realize this, the better. (Or should I say, the sooner they get over their insecurity at having purchased a PS3?)
That point is well made and well taken. Look back at who's won each console generation: the 2600, the NES, the SNES, the Playstation and the PS2. Only the SNES had a true hardware advantage. Its always come down to who had solid software support, both in quantity, quality and variety. The same goes for the hendheld world that Nintendo defined with the original gameboy and has held ever since, dispite competitors constantly attacking with more powerful hardware. The gamegear, lynx, TG portable, Nomad, GameCom, Wonderswan and NeoGeo Pocket have all failed to take the lead, garnering at most a following of hardcore fans. Only the PSP, for all its flaws, has managed to hold on as long as it has and to have done as well as it has, but even it is recieving a thorough thrashing at the hand of the GBA and DSs two-pronged fury.
How is this a problem? If the free Silver account allows you to freely view and join servers, just the same as most PC games do now, how are you losing anything? Are you bitching that adding extras like matchmaking and voice chat, not to mention a mechanism to ban known cheaters, will cost you less than 5 bucks a month?
The vast majority of current PC games supporting free multiplayer seem to provide the same thing that the free Silver account will. Also keep in mind that the Account is the same for your Xbox 360 and original XBox. Personally, having one consistant identity, with the same reputation and buddy list, across 3 different platforms is pretty much worth the money to me already.
The arguement in the article seems to be "Some PC games provide some of this functionality for free, therefore any system bringing it all together should be free too!"
While the multiplayer aspects are certainly Halo's holding point over the long term, the single-player campaigns are fun as well. The arguements against the Halo 2 plot was not that it was bad, or lacking, but because the story arch fell apart at the very end -- The plot was never concluded, it simply stopped. Basically, they botched an attempt at a cliff-hanger ending.